In cooking, al dente (/ælˈdɛnteɪ/, Italian: [al ˈdɛnte]; lit. 'to the tooth'[1]) describes pasta or rice that is cooked to be firm to the bite.[2][3][4] The term also extends to firmly-cooked vegetables.[5]
In contemporary Italian cooking, the term identifies the ideal consistency for pasta and involves a brief cooking time.[6][7] Molto al dente is the Italian term for slightly undercooked pasta.[2][8] Undercooking pasta is used in the first round of cooking when a pasta dish is going to be cooked twice.
According to the American Diabetes Association, pasta that is cooked al dente has a lower glycemic index than pasta that is cooked soft.[9] When cooking commercial pasta, the al dente phase occurs right before the white of the pasta center disappears.[4]
Al dente at the Wikibooks Cookbook subproject The dictionary definition of al dente at Wiktionary
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